McEwan and the Jerusalem Prize

The British novelist Ian McEwan was awarded the Jerusalem Prize at the Jerusalem International Book Fair earlier this week. The award had caused controversy in the United Kingdom, where McEwan was urged by some not to accept the prize because it would indicate support for Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem and its treatment of Palestinians. McEwan responded with a letter to the Guardian last week, and further addressed the question in his acceptance speech:

Since accepting the invitation to Jerusalem, my time has not been peaceful. Many groups and individuals, in different terms, with varying degrees of civility, have urged me not to accept this prize. One organization wrote to a national newspaper saying that whatever I believed about literature, its nobility and reach, I couldn’t escape the politics of my decision. Reluctantly, sadly, I must concede that this is the case….

But everybody knows this simple fact: once you’ve instituted a prize for philosophers and creative writers, you have embraced freedom of thought and open discourse, and I take the continued existence of the Jerusalem Prize as a tribute to the precious tradition of a democracy of ideas in Israel.

In his speech, McEwan criticized Israel for what he termed “the nihilism” of making “a long term prison camp of the Gaza Strip.” He continued:

Nihilism has unleashed the tsunami of concrete across the occupied territories. When the distinguished judges of this prize commend me for my ‘love of people and concern for their right to self-realisation’, they seem to be demanding that I mention, and I must oblige, the continued evictions and demolitions, and relentless purchases of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, the process of right of return granted to Jews but not Arabs.

Amis had taken the most flak, after declaring in an interview, “There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ ” McEwan then weathered his own “press storm,” as he called it, for coming to Amis’s defense. McEwan told Corriere della Sera that Amis’s target had been radicals, not all Muslims, and said, “I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on.” The Independent ran an article on McEwan’s remarks, calling them an “astonishingly strong attack.” He was dumbfounded. “I’m just criticizing illiberality,” he said. He posted a message on his Web site, making clear that “Islamism” meant “extremism.” The incident rattled him. “Look at the Islamist Web sites,” he told me. “They want me dead. I can’t see why the Independent did this.”

Zalewski also noted that

McEwan prides himself on his politeness, but he can’t repress a sneer when he speaks of religion…. Speaking of 9/11, [he] told me, “Faith is at best morally neutral, and at worst a vile mental distortion. Our habits are to respect people of faith, but I think we’ve been forced to question those habits. The powers of sweet reason look a lot more attractive post-9/11 than the beckonings of faith, and I no longer put them on equal scales.”

McEwan also addressed religion in his speech in Jerusalem. He said that the tradition of the novel that he works in “has its roots in the secular energies of the European Enlightenment.” He also spoke of the “Jewish tradition in the novel” and singled out “three senior figures”: Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman.

Oz and Grossman were also subjects of recent Profiles in the magazine. In 2004, David Remnick wrote about Oz on the occasion of the publication of the English translation of his memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness”; and last year, George Packer profiled Grossman as his latest novel, “To the End of the Land,” was released. In his piece, Remnick also cited the three writers in McEwan’s speech, and added a fourth:

The four leading novelists in Israel—Oz, Aharon Appelfeld, A. B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman—are all on the political left, supporters of a Palestinian state, but they are distinguished by different emphases in their writing: Appelfeld by his memories of genocidal anti-Semitism in Europe; Grossman by his empathy with the Palestinians in journalistic accounts such as “The Yellow Wind”; Yehoshua by his connection to the non-European Jews, the Sephardim of North Africa and the Arab countries; and Oz by his liberal Zionism.

After discussing the European and Jewish traditions of the novel, McEwan concluded his speech by saying that “the opposite of nihilism is creativity.” He expressed hope for the future:

The novel as a literary form was born out of curiosity about and respect for the individual. Its traditions impel it towards pluralism, openness, a sympathetic desire to inhabit the minds of others. There is no man, woman or child, Israeli or Palestinian, or from any other background, whose mind the novel cannot lovingly reconstruct. The novel is instinctively democratic. I gratefully accept this prize in the hope that the authorities in Jerusalem—a twin capital, one day, I hope—will look to the future of its children and the conflicts that potentially could engulf them, end the settlements and encroachments and aspire creatively to the open, respectful, plural condition of the novel, the literary form that they honor tonight.